SLE is a rheumatic disease characterized by production of auto-antibodies, systemic deposition of auto antibody immune complexes and subsequent tissue damage. It affects 1.5 million Americans and can lead to fatal complications such as kidney or heart failure. As a complex disease, with genetic and environmental risk factors, the analysis of epigenetic variation on the disease is likely to identify key genes that contribute to the disease, and this information could have both diagnostic and therapeutic benefits. Our proposal is designed to investigate the epigenetics of SLE with a small-scale pilot study that will tell us the extent to which DNA methylation contributes to SLE and identify which cell-types are needed for a careful analysis. The data will enable us to estimate the size of any epigenetic effects, so that we can construct well powered future studies to investigate other issues surrounding SLE, such as drug responses and ethnicity differences.